The most spectacular post of the week is ANSYS’ announcement of the winners of their annual hall of fame competition. You really need to check out the fantastic simulations submitted by the winners and finalists. There are also a lot of conference announcements (perhaps normal for the beginning of the year) and 3D printing and scientific visualization news. Regarding the latter, the image to the right is a tribute to Pantone’s color of the year for 2020: Classic Blue.

Events

• The First International Workshop on the Application of Machine Learning Techniques to Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations and Analysis (CFDML) will be held in Frankfurt on 25 June 2020. Papers are due by 30 March. [I will not be able to attend but I’ll be grateful if one of you could share what you see and hear.]
• The call for papers for the 11th International Conference on CFD (ICCFD11) is open until 03 February.
• The 3rd Brazilian Congress of CFD will be held 22-24 July 2020 at the State University of Campinas. The submission date for papers is 27 March.
• High school students are invited to submit proposals to Design/Build/Launch, a new competition from AIAA and Blue Origin. The goal is to propose a microgravity experiment. Deadline is 03 April. [Please share with all your STEM student and teacher friends.]
• Registration is open for the Salome_CFD User Meeting 2020 on 05 May 2020 at the EDF Lab Saclay.
• The Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling 2020 will be held in Strasbourg on 2-4 June.
  • Shape Modeling International will be held at the same time and in the same place.
• SIGGRAPH 2020 will be in Washington, DC on 19-23 July.
• You have until 30 March to submit your abstract for the NATO specialists’ meeting on Advanced Wind Tunnel Boundary Layer Simulation II. (Berlin, 17-19 May 2021)

ANSYS Hall of Fame 2020 competition winner in the academic division, University of Rome, did a cardiovascular simulation with moving boundaries. This was my favorite. MUST SEE the other winners and finalists here. This competition always produces some spectacular results. Image is a screen capture of a video from ansys.com.

CFD for…

• vibration in hard disk drives and DVD drives. [I have an external DVD-RW drive that frequently goes into fluid induced vibration.]
• Formula 1.
• McLaren and Unilever. [CFD makes for strange bedfellows?]
• reengining the B-52.
• coffee bean roasting.
• racing bike handlebars.
• large combustion plants.
• rheology.
• adding an antenna to an aircraft.
• the interaction of wind and buildings.
• the Ducati Panigale V4 2020.
• solid particulate diverters.

Colors & Visualization

• If you are looking for 20 distinct colors for your visualization, here they are.
  • [As you know, I have an unwarranted obsession with engineering graphics and data visualization. I am a fan of Edward Tufte and his books. I believe rainbow color maps are harmful and ask that we in CFD stop displaying sickly green flowfields. Unwarranted because visualization is not my area of expertise. But that never stopped me before so…]
• [So while I’m off-topic and talking about colors], Pantone’s color of the year for 2020 is Classic Blue for its constancy and confidence (Pantone 19-4052, RGB (51, 85, 139), Hex #34558B).
• Flowing Data’s best visualization projects of 2019.
• Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for November 2019.

Thomas Lin Pederson, Genesis. Done in R. Looks “fluidic” to me. One of the best visualization projects in the article above. Image from Pederson’s website.

The Cloud

• vScaler offers a cloud-based CFD solution.
• “CFD happens to be one of our largest workloads for for CPU at Nimbix.”
• OnScale announced a “pay as you go” SaaS model for simulation in the cloud.

Software

• Simcenter 3D 2020.1 was released.
  • Simcenter Femap 2020.1 was released.
  • Simcenter FLOEFD 2019.3 was released.
• VirtusAero supports the US3D CFD code and offers their STABL codes for hypersonic boundary layers. [This company has been around since 2015 but I just learned about them recently.]
• CADbro. [Yes, that’s the real name. CAD. Bro. Ladies, how do you feel about that?] Software for viewing and collaborating with 3D CAD data.
• Eddy3d computes “airflow and microclimate simulations for Rhino and Grasshopper.”

3D Scanning and Printing

• It seems that there’s more than one way to 3D print something and the 3D printing parameters have a strong effect on the part’s strength and other attributes. Hence the need for “intelligent slicing” as described in this article from Teton Simulation.
• If you have a 3D scan of an organic form and want to convert it to CAD, a partnership between Thor3D and nPowerSoftware is working on this problem.

Example of KVS QuickSurface for working with mesh-based, point cloud, 3D scan data. Image from develop3d.com.

Miscellaneous

• This post is almost a year old but it’s worth revisiting: Know Thy Mesh. “There is no decisive answer for a one and inclusive ‘best practice’ when it comes to mesh generation.”
  • [Suggestion: Let’s start thinking about mesh suitability versus mesh quality.]
• Mathematicians have proved the existence of a singularity in solutions to the Euler equations.
• ENGYS seeks a UK/EU citizen for a Senior CFD Engineer position.
• How about a 30-minute video introduction to CFD?

Mapping Into the Plane

Sarah Morris is a prolific artist whose work covers film sculpture, painting and more. Many of her paintings are abstractions of vibrant, urban landscapes flattened into the picture plane. The term topology is used when discussing her work which further draws me toward an analogy with mesh generation whereby a complex mesh in 3D is unfolded into a 2D mapping. That’s demonstrated in her painting Rockhopper shown below. The cityscape motif is readily apparent but so is a mesh’s topology.

Some have drawn comparisons with Frank Stella’s work, especially the color palette. And Stella’s works were definitely inspired by architecture and the urban environments in which he lived. But Stella said that you’re always trying to paint the third dimension which is where Morris’ work truly excels.

Sarah Morris, Rockhopper [Origami], 2009. Image from artist’s website. See links above.